


and then it feels like freedom

by acousticvegetables



Category: Murdoch Mysteries
Genre: Falling In Love, Happy Ending, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, The Philately Fatality, hooray!, watts is gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 13:50:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21447238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acousticvegetables/pseuds/acousticvegetables
Summary: “walking through a bunch of rainstorms does not make you damaged. if you keep on going, it actually makes you clean.”coming to terms with the scariest part of himself, watts decides that he’s outgrown his old home.jack lets llewellyn in and paints him golden.(a continuation of the philately fatality)
Relationships: Llewellyn Watts/Jack Walker
Comments: 5
Kudos: 74





	and then it feels like freedom

**Author's Note:**

> okay. so they finally made watts gay and you're wondering what to do with your earthly form while daniel maslany waits in the wings for his moment to shine amidst the writers continuously trying to contain him on the bench? well, i'm here and i've written some of the very water that shall sustain us through the terrible watts drought of 2019™ . i love you, dear watts fan, and i have decided to give the gays everything they deserve. 
> 
> i hope you enjoy it :)

Somehow, he knew he’d end up here. Watts knew he couldn’t live forever in the shadows, he was tired of avoiding every touch and every quickening of the heart. It was, along with the rest of the universe, inevitable. 

“Can I offer you something to drink? Some tea, perhaps?” Jack asked. 

“Yes, thank you.”

“Please, take a seat wherever you’d like,” he said as he disappeared into the kitchen. 

Watts held his hat firmly between his hands, sweat beginning to pool in his knuckles. The apartment was nice, far nicer than his room in the boarding house, with a few paintings up on the walls and a fireplace with some embers still burning inside. Watts didn’t have a fireplace, only a vent and a small stove, and a kitchen was something he could only dream of: the escape from communal dinners and burned coffee. It was so far from the bachelor’s life he lived. Jack seemed too settled, too mature, too established in his life. Perhaps this was a mistake, he could probably slip out the door and make it home without being noticed—he would never see Jack again. 

“Here you are, Detective,” he said, placing a tray with two tea cups and a pot on the table in front of two armchairs. 

Watts perched himself on the edge of one of the chairs. “Llewellyn,” he replied.

“Pardon?”

“Llewellyn, that’s … my name. There’s no need for you to call me ‘Detective.’”

“Of course.”

Jack sat down in the chair next to his, facing the ember-filled fireplace, and took one of the tea cups to cradle it in his hand. The hat found its way onto a side table and Watts lifted the other tea cup to his mouth. It burned without taste on his tongue. Not that he minded all that much. 

“My mother gave me this set when I moved out of my parent’s house. She decided that if I should ever have company she wouldn’t want me to embarrass her by not having something in which to offer tea.” Jack chuckled lightly and shook his head. “Though the design is far too feminine, even for me.”

Watts smiled, fidgeting in his seat. 

“Something bothering you, Detective?” Jack asked, then added: “Sorry, it’ll take a moment to kick the habit.”

“I … guess I don’t understand how you can be so comfortable with …”

“My _unnatural ways_, you mean?”

Nodding slowly, Watts took another burning sip. 

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I think I realized, first of all, that there’s nothing unnatural about it. Animals of all sorts are homosexual, so it turns out that the laws of Christianity don’t hold over particularly well when considering _all_ of God’s kingdom. And, even if it were breaking some natural law, it would be far better to live in opposition to that law than follow it against my own heart. I think any other life might’ve killed me, and very slowly at that.” He paused for a moment, setting his cup back on the table. “Can I assume that you decided to visit me tonight in order to come to terms with your … homosexuality?”

Watts set his cup back on the table as well, the clatter of china echoing louder than he intended. Part of him cursed Jack for asking, for he must have known already, but the other part of him knew he needed to confront this. Trust, he needed to trust him. Jack, he had come back and saved Watts once. He had come back. 

“Yes, it’s … complicated. With my job and the Inspector, it’s been …” Watts’s voice choked with dread. “I can’t lose my job, it’s the only thing I have left, and the trust of the Inspector is so fleeting, I half expected him to dismiss me on the spot when I told him of our agreement.”

“I’m sorry you might have suffered on my behalf,” Jack said softly. 

“It was a decision I made, it wouldn’t have been your fault. My own hubris—I couldn’t stop putting myself in the shoes of those men, and wondering … worrying ...”

“You’re scared, I understand. It’s a difficult thing to realize; you’re likely confused and upset.” Jack sighed with a rattling breath. “But there’s no other way to be, Llewellyn—you have to accept yourself or you’ll keep it inside and the pressure of it will build and build until one day you’ll explode. If you don’t at least try, you’ll end up hurting people you never meant to hurt, yourself included.” 

This was exploding, of a sort, like floodgates opening or an internal hemorrhage; his heart was cracked down the middle and everything dark and slimy and terrifying inside was pouring out onto the wooden floor. “I just wish I were normal,” Watts said, bubbling tears beginning to roll down his face, sounding utterly pathetic. “It … it would be easier ... if I could simply … if I—”

“You _are_ normal, there’s nothing wrong with the way you’re feeling.”

Watts threw his hands over his eyes, digging his elbows into his thighs. “I wanted a family, Jack. I’m so alone. I don’t want to be alone.”

His cheeks burned with each admission he made. But Jack, kneeling before him, grasped Watts’s hands so earnestly and pulled them away from his face, holding both of his hands with both of his own, and looked up at him in tender sympathy. Watts couldn’t help himself. On the edge of collapsing into himself and curling up his knees to his chest, it occurred to Watts that he had stood, many times, face to face with the worst of life, felt the curdling smoke of fate hot on his heels, and it hadn’t killed him yet. 

Because he had been here before. When his sister had gone missing, never returning from her day at work and never returning at all, he had spent that last night under the crushing pain of darkness with his body contorted underneath their kitchen table and the quilt from his parent’s bed tight over his shoulders. The police would take him away the next morning, probably find him a place in an orphanage. His twelve-year-old self couldn’t have known that Mrs. Young would have been so kind as to gift him a place in her family—the one thing that kept him sane and out of trouble. Everything ached in him, knowing that that would be the last night in the home where his mother had sung quiet songs in Yiddish while scrubbing away at the laundry, where his father had trimmed his beard early in the morning, and where he had played with his sister, keeping quiet while their parents held hushed evening conversations. He remembered so little else of them. He couldn’t stop crying. 

In the days prior, Watts had been holding his breath, each battle with Brackenreid over the case was like taking a step out of the doorway of another home he had lived in his whole life. His mouth would turn to heated desert, entire limbs shaking. Watts was twelve again—the world was scary and mean but he couldn’t stay in that house anymore. There was so much wrong with it, things he didn’t notice until it was time to leave, things broken and lying around him in heaps of ruin: sharp glass and melted wax and men at his neck. He had to leave, he couldn’t live there anymore. He had to stop taking hesitant steps. One step after another, this was the way. The only way for him to start breathing again. 

One deep breath. Another. And another. 

He firmed his grip on Jack’s hands, tears finally letting up. 

“You’re alright, everything will be fine. You can trust me,” Jack said, offering a sad smile. 

“Thank you.”

“Family is not as hard to find in this life as you might think. You need only open yourself up to the possibilities, though it might not be what you thought it would be. But you need never be completely alone.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

It was only then, when their eyes met, that Watts noticed the way Jack’s were, too, glistening with tears. A rush of guilt overcame him, engulfed him. 

Then Jack's lips were on his, soft and steadfast. Watts raised his hands up to Jack’s cheeks and cupped his jaw there, far smoother than his neglected stubble. He’d never felt that before, the beard of another man. Jack had pulled him closer with a hold on his waist. His hands stayed there, even as Watts pulled away and Jack’s breath was warm over his mouth. One burst forward and they would meet again, and the evening might have ended differently. 

“I … really should be going, it’s dark and … I’m sorry,” said Watts. 

He took off for the door and placed his hat haphazardly back on his head: Watts had turned into a small deer, spooked and springing to get away. The pattern of his lips had been imprinted and left alive; he’d never forget the weight of his hands on his waist. He yearned, ached for it to happen all over again so that his body could be new and spontaneously extant, enacted at Jack’s every move. Everything was buzzing around him and it was enough to shake him out of his skin. 

“Llewellyn!” Jack called, catching up to him at the door and leaning his shoulder against the wall next to it. “I hope I didn’t … overstep. It doesn’t have to mean more than you want it to.”

“No, no that’s not it. I … liked it very much.” Watts smiled sheepishly, scratching at his chin. “Much to think about now. You’ve been very kind, I can’t thank you enough.”

“Glad to be of help,” Jack chuckled, “But do you have a habit of never staying in one place for long? You’re always in such a hurry to leave.”

“Perhaps … ” Watts considered, “I hadn’t thought of it that way before.”

“Well, maybe you’d like to stay awhile some other time?”

“That would be nice,” Watts said. 

Eyes locking once more, both men smiled, so boldly it made Watts dip his head in how it overwhelmed him. 

“Goodnight, Llewellyn.” Jack took his hand again and they grasped each other tightly, neither letting go until Watts stepped through the door and pulled Jack’s hand along with him. Their arms linked them until they didn’t anymore. The distance was short enough to bridge, a single hand reaching across could have ended their separation, but their new bond could extend farther than two-arms-length. So Watts left, knowing that a part of Jack’s soul now resided with him, and a part of him now lived alongside Jack. The thought kept him warm. 

The street outside was cold and each breath became its own cloud, but the sky extended so far above the city that the future seemed to float with each time Watts gazed up at the stars. He was light now, the weight of his conscience finally unloaded. The inevitable end he would face was now different, very different. He was free.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't post much for murdoch mysteries content, but i do post a lot about being gay (lol), so if you want to find me i'm on tumblr at itisabeauteousevening.tumblr.com
> 
> thank you for reading. 
> 
> i love you to pieces. 
> 
> \- syd


End file.
